The bounce expected from Barack Obama's Democratic Convention speech collapsed the following day under the reality check that the current unemployment figure is 8.1%. And 40.7% of those people have been out of work for 27 weeks or more.
Those numbers tell only a small part of Obama's failure to deliver on his promises. The real unemployment figure is closer to 19%. The official count doesn't include the 8 million unemployed who have given up and stopped looking for a job, the people who have had to settle for part-time work, those who had to take lower-paying jobs that are well below their qualifications or the 11 million who are out of the workforce collecting Social Security disability checks.
The plight of young Americans is even worse. For 18- to 29-year-olds, the unemployment rate is 12.7%.
The majority of jobs lost during our current depression were well-paying jobs, while the majority of jobs that Obama brags about increasing are lower-paying jobs.
The National Employment Law Project reports that occupations in construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13, accounted for 60% of job losses and only 22% of job growth. Meanwhile, 58% of the job growth Obama bragged about was lower-paying jobs with hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83.
The jobs with the fastest growth were retail sales, where the median wage is $10.97 an hour, and food-preparation jobs that pay $9.04 per hour. Some of these jobs are taken by entry-level workers, but many others are taken by older Americans who were laid off from well-paying jobs.
A Labor Day weekend report also came from the Department of Agriculture, which showed us that 46,670,373 Americans are now receiving food stamps at an annual cost to the taxpayers of $71.8 billion.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
